Charles Ellicott Commentary Job 9

If he will contend with him. — If man chooses to contend with God, he cannot answer Him one question of a thousand, once in a thousand times.

And sealeth up the stars—Compare Job 41:15. The idea of shutting up, taking away the power of, etc., is contained in the expression “sealing.”

Waves of the sea. —Literally, high place of the sea: the sea when and where it runs mountains high. The various physical phenomena of earthquake, eclipse, and hurricane are here described as the field of Divine action and the operations of His hands.

Which maketh Arcturus ... —This shows us that in the time of this writer, whoever he was, his fellow-countrymen had attained to such knowledge of astronomy as is here implied in the specific names of definite constellations. The Great Bear is the glory of the northern hemisphere, Orion of the southern sky, and the Pleiades of the east; the chambers of the north are the unknown and unexplored regions, of which the speaker has no personal experience.

Which doeth great things. —He adopts the very words his former antagonist, Eliphaz, had used in Job 5:9.